WASHINGTON — The Department of Veterans Affairs announced today that they would release a new white noise app to help veterans with insomnia go back to the last place they felt safe, secure, and ready to drift into four hours of fitful sleep.
“We found that when these service members were serving, they could sleep anywhere,” said Dr. Stacey Clarke, VA’s Chief Sleep Scientist. “They could sleep on a rucksack, in the back of a Humvee, or on top of a stranger when they drunkenly stumbled into the wrong barracks room. Then they get to the VA and ‘can’t sleep.’ This app is an important step to self care.”
The app begins with tracks that encourage a meditative state of pretending you don’t hear anything, like track 1 “ass-chewing in the distance,” track 3 “volunteers for cigarette butt police call,” and track 7 “roommate beating of two feet away from you.” As you wade further into sleep, the app automatically drifts into tracks that make the service member feel as though the sleep will last forever, like the 45-minute track “continuously piggy-backed operations and intelligence briefing.”
